The musician kicked out of a George Michael classic
Any session musician who has been around the block knows that you need to be a monster behind your instrument. It’s no use trying to fly blind going into every session, and you always need to do your homework on whichever act you’re working with to get the best out of your instrument. While it might seem easy to play a simple pop song, one musician was mortified when he was asked to leave working with George Michael.
By the time Michael had started gaining traction with WHAM, he was hardly even out of high school. Forming the band when they were still in their teens, Michael and Andrew Ridgely were all about making the kind of music meant for mindless fun on the dance floors, if the lyrics to ‘WHAM Rap’ are anything to go on.
After writing different songs to flesh out their albums, Michael realised that he didn’t just want to be a fly-by-night pop star. He wanted to be taken seriously as an artist, and ‘Careless Whisper’ was going to be what got him there. Recording the demo before the band had a record deal, Michael knew that the song was special and was going to spend years waiting for just the right moment to unleash his song on the world.
Once the band’s debut album Fantastic started blowing up, they had the world at their fingertips when going in to make the album Make It Big. Michael had grown up quite a bit following his big break, and songs like ‘Everything She Wants’ were intended to bring a mature angle to their songs, telling a dark story rather than just another pop hit for the kids.
If fans could take the sounds of something serious, it was then time to dust off ‘Careless Whisper’. As opposed to the arrangement that most people know and love today, Michael was originally taken to the US to get the right sound for the song, working with production legend Jerry Wexler to get the sounds he heard in his head.
For all the panache Michael brings to it, any self-respecting music fan knows that the song is all down to one thing…the saxophone. Michael may have written out the notes that he wanted the saxophonist to play, but even one of the best in the business couldn’t get it the way that Michael wanted.
Overseeing the session, WHAM manager Simon Napier-Bell remembered how torturous it was having to see the seasoned pro be brought down a peg, saying, “He arrived at eleven and should have been gone by twelve. Instead, after two hours, he was still there while everyone in the studio shuddered with embarrassment. He just couldn’t play the opening riff the way George wanted it, the way it had been on the demo. But that had been made two years earlier by a friend of George’s who lived round the corner and played sax for fun in the pub”.
That kind of spontaneity could not be equalled by someone who was reading it off a sheet, leading to Michael scrapping the initial sessions and going back to the drawing board before returning to England to get the saxophone sound he wanted. He may have been in the land that had birthed his favourite singers like Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder, but no matter how many times you throw different songs at session musicians, sometimes the best take is the one that has a few amateur parts to it.
